The current fingerprint recognition methods, when used in particular to identify individuals in order to allow, for example, access to protected premises, the use of certain appliances or the checking of identities, are often based on the “minutiae” of these fingerprints, that is, particular areas or points of the prints that enable them to be discriminated from each other. The parameters of these minutiae are normally their coordinates, their orientation and their valency (that is, the type of the minute detail, which can be a bifurcation or a line end). Furthermore, to refine the discrimination, other complementary parameters are used, which are, for example, local statistical information or “ridge-counts”. Taking account of all of these parameters means constructing an extremely voluminous database when it contains the fingerprints of a large number of individuals, and the operation for comparing fingerprints of an individual with those from such a database containing the prints of a large number of individuals requires a lengthy computation time.